Intro

Welcome to this momentary pit stop on the road to finding what you need
concerning gzip!

gzip is a single-file/stream lossless data compression
utility, where the resulting compressed file generally has the suffix
.gz.
gzip also refers to the associated compressed data format
used by the utility.

Links

GNU gzip home page,
where you can find the latest gzip source code, documentation, and development information

gzip documentation (from that home page),
if you came here with questions about how to use gzip, this is the link for you

pigz home page,
where pigz is a parallel implementation of gzip, able to take advantage of multiple processors, cores, and threads

A Brief History

Back when
woolly mammoths roamed the Earth,
Jean-loup Gailly
and Mark Adler wrote
the gzip utility to replace the Unix compress utility. At
the time the continued use of compress was threatened by giant
corporations holding patents on the LZW algorithm used by
compress. In addition to avoiding patent infringement,
gzip provided superior compression. The gzip utility and
format remain in wide use, these many eons later.